Making the ViewSonic Tablet PC Run Linux

A few more items needed to be addressed before this tablet really was usable for
the ISP. The first issue was the PCMCIA wireless LAN card. As it is a fairly
popular PCMCIA device, I expected it could be plugged into a running
system and be detected. Reality turned out not to be quite that easy. When I
plugged the card in, no messages appeared in /var/log/messages and it was not
seen by the system. Perhaps a setting could be tweaked somewhere, but I
thought I first would try having the card inserted into the machine for a
warm-reboot. That seemed to work just fine. Incidentally, the system
correctly would handle ejecting the card, but not its reinsertion. But as long as
it was present at boot, there were no problems with it.

Mutual Data Service's software requests were quite simple. All they really
needed (so far) were Ethereal, the graphical network traffic analyzer;
kismet, an 802.11 wireless network traffic sniffer; and xmms, the extensible
media player. Xmms and Ethereal were installed with the basic install, and
kismet was installed from DVD by using YaST.

Creating System Profiles

The last task is making it quick and simple to change network profiles, a
task that SuSE makes easy. The System Configuration Profile Management (SCPM)
module, accessed through YaST, allows the system administrator to change
the network location of the system with a few mouse clicks.

To use SCPM you first need to start YaST, which requires the root password. Select
Profile Manager from the System group to open a new window for SCPM
(Figure 5). SCPM is not enabled when it first is installed. Figure 6 shows our
final configuration, in which you can see the General Setup section and the Options...
button. Selecting the Options... button brings up the SCPM options
window (Figure 7). SCPM can be activated by selecting the Enabled button near the top of the
screen and then the OK button in the lower right.

Figure 5. A Window for SCPM

Figure 6. Final Configuration

Figure 7. SCPM Options Window

To use SCPM, you must configure the network settings and then save them into a
profile. New profiles can be created simply by changing settings and storing
them in that profile.

This is the process I used to create our set of profiles:

1. Open the YaST SCPM module on one desktop and the YaST Network cards
configuration window on another (Figure 8).

Figure 8. Windows for YaST SCPM and Network Cards

2. Select the Add button on the SCPM screen to open the dialog for
creating a new profile (Figure 9). Make the profile from
the current system configuration and check the make the new
configuration active box. Select the OK button.

Figure 9. Creating a New Profile

3. The Special profile settings screen should
appear (Figure 10), where you can enter a name for the new profile and a short
description. This screen also allows specifying pre-
and post-start and stop scripts, which provide amazing
flexibility when changing profiles. I was doing basic network
settings changes, so these scripts are not needed.

Figure 10. Special Profile Settings

4. Going back to the YaST Network cards configuration screen,
I made the changes I wanted in this profile.
In this case, I disabled the RJ-45 network connection and configured the
SMC wlan0 device. Select Finish on network changes to close that
window. I now have the system configured the way I want
the current profile to be stored, but the profile is not
yet stored.

5. Now go back to the main SCPM page and Add a new profile. (It might
seem like a step is missing here, but it is not.) When the
new profile dialog comes up, it can be created either from the current
system configuration or from another profile. If created from the
current system configuration, do not make it the active profile.
Select the OK button, enter a name and description for the new
profile and commit the changes.

6. Back at the main SCPM window, select the newly created profile
and click the Switch to... button. The changes to the network
configuration made in step 4 are be seen by SCPM as modified from
the current profile (not the one created in step 5), so
I was asked if I wanted to save those changes to the current profile before unloading
it (Figure 11). The default is to save the changes
(note the X next to the network resource group), so I chose OK and
the changes were saved to the current profile, the affected subsystems
were stopped (networking in our case), the new profile from step 5
was made active/current and the stopped subsystems were
restarted.

Figure 11. Saving the Current Profile

7. The system now has the newly created profile
active. I now needed to go back to step 4 and make changes to the current profile before creating
another new one and saving the current.

As an added ease-of-use feature, I set root's KDE environment to have two
desktops, one for SCPM and one for everything else. As long as YaST is
running on the SCPM desktop when root logs out, YaST automatically
starts up and goes to the correct desktop at the next login.

My sys admin group recently received one of these Viewpad 1000 systems as a turn-in - and it was destined for the trash - it was running Win2K and the admin password had been lost. Based on this article I rescued the system, dug up a usb floppy and installed SUSE 9.3 on it. It is now working extremely well as a linux tablet -- though I'm still having a little difficulty changing the screen orientation - not a show stopper but it would be nice. Everything seems to be working including the touch screen - though I haven't tried the camera yet. All in all - a very successful quick experiment - with the result, a quite useable system.

If you go into the SaX2 properties for the video card you can change screen orientation - though the screen on the ViewPad looks like it has a polarization that makes it look best in landscape mode (my personal opinion only).

I have an EARLY ViewPad 1000 running a version of Win2K hacked with early "Tablet PC" support. The internal camera is usable only via the MS Imaging utility. Supposedly, it is a USB device, though it doesn't show up in the Attached Devices list.

Hmmm...not sure I see how this made a better tablet. I'm kind of tired of reading the "put Linux on everything to save the world from M$ even if it doesn't make sense" viewpoint. I think I would have fixed Windows.

I am also not sure why you had Windows 98 on it considering it is a tablet. Mine came with a tablet version of XP which works pretty well actually.

After upgrading mine to XP tablet edition, I've found that the touchscreen is only being handled as mouse emulation, and not as an actual pen device from XPs perspective. Would you be willing to share the input driver that allows XP to see the touchscreen input as a pen? I haven't seen anything from Viewsonic about this. That aside, it is a fairly slow machine running XP.

I am somewhat surprised by the "Tablet PC" nomenclature. For a laptop to be called so, It has to use Windows XP tablet PC edition, which (regardless of your feelings towards MS) works much better than Windows 98.

Interesting, but what about the touchscreen? I would have thought that the major issue with moving from the manufacturer-installed OS to Linux would be how to get the touchscreen working. Isn't that the main idea of tablet PCs?

High,
I did the following steps:
1.Tried to install Opensuse 10.0 on the V1100. Everythink runs but the pen did'n.t!
2.I tried the same with Suse 9.3 and afterwards I tried to configure the WACOM with the same attributes I found in some googled documents for the V1000: wacom,Absolute,/dev/ttyS0,Bottomx 30000,GRAFIRE/INTUOS Stylus(SERIAL). But I had no success. Has anybody similar expieriences or even better ones?

Hi,
I also installed OpenSUSE 10.0 on the V1100 tablet pc.
I would like to get the pen working too. If you cat /dev/ttyS0 you can watch the pen being moved around. Adding a pen (with default config) to the configuration doesn't work. If no one else has a fix or a workaround, I might be able to kludge something together, but I won't have time for a while. If anyone else out there has anything, please tell us about it.

(None of my other Win PCs liked collecting viruses and spyware so much. Nor were they as adept at circumventing McAfee. Boot up time was finally in excess of half an hour before I pulled the plug on that OS's sorry life. Viewsonic never provided install disks, so even if I wanted to, I can't go back to XP Tablet. And that's fine with me.)

I just bought one of these guys on Ebay, and I'll probably end up installing Debian linux on it. Any tips you had would be greatly appreciated. I'd like to write some tablet oriented software too, if I have the time.